robkin wrote:I disagree.. the market for chess sites is quite overloaded so a chess site needs something to make it unique: Chesscube has the best interface of all sites

I agree, chesscube has the best interface (especially for portability, it needs only a pc with flash and not a local custom software) for a market of chess sites that normally have the same "1999" interface for years.

and it has rating floors what I very much appreciate

But anyway i don't think that these constraints (that are useful but i don't understand why them should last forever) contribute a lot for the fame of the site. Indeed i think that rating floors are quite unknown between casual players.

Anyway, a side observation. If general rating isn't used in tournaments, then the rating floor (that last forever) can be applied only on tournament ratings instead of both ratings.

I don't understand why the rating floor system is necessary. Ok someone can downgrade propositally his own rating to play in weaker tournaments, but if the site has registered the personal best of each account, this should serve as parameter to prevent sandbagging. I mean, anybody with an personal best 2050 couldn't ingress in an 1800- tournament even with a 17xx rating.

The actual system causes a big rating inflation. When I started to play in this site (2009) my rating was around 1550/1600. I improved my rating to 1900/1950 now, but i believe that around 200 points of this upgrade was due rating inflation.

Everyone says that chesscube ratings are inflated. How does that work exactly? They use the same ELO system as everyone else. The only possibility I see is that because﻿ the site starts you at 1500, so there are a lot of bad players with around 1500 ratings that you can beat up to gain points quickly. However, I would think that would only distort things a little around the middle strength levels. That or the chesscube admins are lying about using a straight elo. What gives here? Do the ratings floors also distort things?